ABSTRACT
The leader of the Democratic Party for a generation in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, William Jennings Bryan ran for president three times and served as secretary of state in the administration of President Woodrow Wilson. Bryan was a champion of the rights of ordinary Americans and was a vocal conservative Christian. Bryan was born in Illinois and became an attorney in the early 1880s. Soon thereafter, he moved to Lincoln, Nebraska, where he won election to the US House of Representatives in 1890 and 1892. After his congressional tenure ended, Bryan published a newspaper and continued to speak out on issues of importance to his readers in the Great Plains region. Bryan lost the 1896 election, in part because many eastern Democrats refused to support him. His campaign, however, along with those of 1900 and 1908 helped convert the Democratic Party into the reform organization it continued to be throughout the twentieth century.
